Lighting question

fredjclaus

Well,

I've been taking the advise of Art and a few others who told me to check out some websites. I was watching some of the videos and I noticed that they were talking about doing White balancing when shooting without studio lighting.

One video was shooting with a Tungsten bulb as well as with compact fluorescent bulbs. Instead of using a gray card to set a custom white balance, they set the balance to "Tungsten" or "daylight". Now my camera does not have those settings but I do have "Incandescent" and "Fluorescent". is that the same thing?

I think I'm FINALLY learning this lighting thing.

Tim Kamppinen

fredjclaus wrote:

Well,

I've been taking the advise of Art and a few others who told me to check out some websites. I was watching some of the videos and I noticed that they were talking about doing White balancing when shooting without studio lighting.

One video was shooting with a Tungsten bulb as well as with compact fluorescent bulbs. Instead of using a gray card to set a custom white balance, they set the balance to "Tungsten" or "daylight". Now my camera does not have those settings but I do have "Incandescent" and "Fluorescent". is that the same thing?

I think I'm FINALLY learning this lighting thing.

Tungsten is the same as incandescent. Fluorescent is fluorescent, but you're probably better off with a custom white balance when shooting under fluorescent because there's a huge amount of variance in the actual light that fluorescent lights put out. Some CFL's are supposed to look like tungsten bulbs or daylight or whatever, but I would just use the gray card if possible because it eliminates the guesswork. The camera's tungsten WB will probably do an ok job under actual tungsten light but you might as well use a gray card for that too because it's not hard and it might be better, and certainly won't be worse. Especially if the tungsten bulbs are on a dimmer switch. The color temperature changes as you dim the lights; just before you turn them off they're very red, and at full power they're more yellowish.

That's just my take on it. If you start mixing flash with these other light sources, you're going to want to gel your flash to match the ambient light in the room. Generally that means a CTO gel for tungsten lights and a plus green gel for fluorescents (the traditional kind anyway).

fredjclaus

Thanks for the answers Tim, I'm going to be playing around with what I've learned so far. My camera club friend has let me borrow his gray cards for the weekend, so I forcast a bunch of shooting this weekend. Now to play around and learn how to get the gray cards to look gray instead of brown.

Tim Kamppinen

fredjclaus wrote:

Thanks for the answers Tim, I'm going to be playing around with what I've learned so far. My camera club friend has let me borrow his gray cards for the weekend, so I forcast a bunch of shooting this weekend. Now to play around and learn how to get the gray cards to look gray instead of brown.

To be honest I don't have any gray cards, but what works for me is to just use blank sheet of white paper, or anything white really, I've used a white t-shirt that someone was wearing. Just put the lens in manual mode and defocus it so there's no detail in the frame, just a blank white field, and make sure that it's lit up by the light you're trying to balance for (not falling in a shadow created by your head... it happens...) and it should work very well. A gray card might be more accurate, I suppose; I've never tried one to see. You could do a comparision to see if one seems better to you than the other.

Jeremy Winterberg

all I use is a white sheet of paper... cheap and easy to replace! In your camera's viewfinder... (not sure if nikon is the same) ... there should be a circle in the middle of your focus points... make sure the white/grey card is filling that up... and set your camera's metering to spot metering...

custom white balances generally give you more accurate color... but sometimes thats not the look you're going for.

ziggy53

I highly recommend reading this thread for a pretty good discussion:

http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=126209

pathfinder

One concern about using a sheet of white paper, for me at least, is that the white of papers can very quite a bit, some are cool blue, some are much warmer, and some have optical brightener that may react to UV light a bit.

That is why I prefer a more formal white balancing tool as I have written about previously here. If you are going to white balance you do want to do it well, because one it is done incorrectly, it is much harder to correct again after the fact if you are shooting jpgs.

Tim Kamppinen

pathfinder wrote:

One concern about using a sheet of white paper, for me at least, is that the white of papers can very quite a bit, some are cool blue, some are much warmer, and some have optical brightener that may react to UV light a bit.

That is why I prefer a more formal white balancing tool as I have written about previously here. If you are going to white balance you do want to do it well, because one it is done incorrectly, it is much harder to correct again after the fact if you are shooting jpgs.

That's a good point, and I should mention that I always shoot raw so I don't worry about whether it's spot on or not. For people shots I frequently warm things beyond what's technically accurate anyway because it looks better. But yes, if you're shooting jpegs and you want it to be technically correct, a piece of paper isn't the best solution.

Jeremy Winterberg

Tim Kamppinen wrote:

That's a good point, and I should mention that I always shoot raw so I don't worry about whether it's spot on or not. For people shots I frequently warm things beyond what's technically accurate anyway because it looks better. But yes, if you're shooting jpegs and you want it to be technically correct, a piece of paper isn't the best solution.

haha, yeah, same thing for me. I shoot raw 100% of the time to leave room for minor errors. So I guess if you do shoot jpeg you would need something a tad more accurate!